DEI initiatives at Alpine Investors are implemented at both the firm and its portfolio companies. The private equity firm has made several commitments to ensure significant progress over the next five years in hiring, advancing and promoting underrepresented individuals at San Francisco-based Alpine and within its portfolio. As part of its commitment to DEI, Alpine hired Divya Gopal as head of DEI in 2021. Read more below.
What steps are you taking to improve DEI at your portfolio companies?
While impact begins at Alpine HQ, we believe that every step we take as a firm has the potential to ripple out across our portfolio companies around the country.
Hiring diverse executive talent is one of many bright spots in our portfolio. In addition to hiring 14 women and 13 people of color into our CEO in training program – the 2022 class consists of 72 percent underrepresented individuals – our executive leadership team has aligned to an ambitious set of DEI commitments by 2027 to support our portfolio. This includes training portfolio leaders on inclusive hiring practices and creating personalized DEI commitments specifically for our companies.
What results have you achieved?
In August 2021, we launched our first growth internship program to incorporate talented young professionals without four-year degrees into the Alpine family. The program is designed to combat racial and socioeconomic imbalances in the industry by working with community college students and exposing them to private equity. More than 30 Alpine employees onboard, train and mentor, to create career options for these students. In partnership with Year Up and Traject, an operating business within Alpine portfolio company ASG, four students made up our first class of growth interns. As of January 2022, 100 percent of our interns have accepted post-internship opportunities at both Traject and Alpine.
Our dedication to inclusive hiring has led to the following across the firm and the portfolio including:
• The most diverse incoming intern and analyst group in Alpine history across gender, race, socioeconomic status and school representation. Our 2022 summer intern class identifies as 60 percent women, with over 10 new undergraduate schools represented. With specific hiring partnerships in place to address the lack of Black/Latinx talent in our pipeline from previous years, for the first time 12.5 percent of our new investing interns identify as Black/Latinx.
• 70 percent of all 2021 new hires identify as underrepresented at Alpine.
• Our CIT program has placed 14 women directly in CEO positions.
